Knight of Disks
Fire of Earth
The Lord of the Wide and Fertile Land; the King of the Spirits of Earth
Rider-Waite: King of Pentacles
- Knight Yod, Fire
- Disks Heh final, Earth
- Fire of Earth rank of suit
- Chokmah sphere of the Knights
- Atziluth the world of emanation
- 21° Leo to 20° Virgo Aug 12 – Sep 11
- ♌︎Leo
- ♍︎Virgo
- Leo III Seven of Wands
- Virgo I Eight of Disks
- Virgo II Nine of Disks
- Hexagram 62 Hsiao Kuo, the Preponderance of the Small (Thunder over Mountain)
- Earth colour element
In a reading
Heavy, dull, materialistic, laborious, patient, clever in material things, a farmer rather than a fighter; the man who gets the harvest in. Badly placed: avaricious, grasping, dull, jealous, stupid.
On the card
A knight in dark armour with a stag's antlers for a crest sits on a heavy horse in a field of ripe wheat, holding a flail; a disk like a shield rests beside him and the light is that of late summer.
Kabbalah and astrology
The Yod of the final Heh: Fire of Earth, energy applied to matter, the labour that produces. He rules the last decan of Leo (the Seven of Wands) and the first two of Virgo (the Eight and Nine of Disks): the harvest itself. Crowley's hexagram, 62, is thunder over the mountain: force spent on small things, which is exactly his virtue and his limit.
Rules Seven of Wands (Leo III, Mars), Eight of Disks (Virgo I, The Sun), Nine of Disks (Virgo II, Venus). The courts of the twelve arcs each take the last decan of one sign and the first two of the next, so that every court contains a hidden tension between two signs.
I Ching
Crowley builds each court's hexagram from two trigrams, the suit below and the rank above: Disks give Mountain, Knights give Thunder. The result is hexagram 62, Hsiao Kuo, the Preponderance of the Small (Thunder over Mountain). See I Ching and the courts.
Depth psychology
Sensation in its most active form: the doer of physical work. As an inner figure, the animus as provider. The four ranks are often read as the four ways the suit's function can be lived: the Knight extraverted and initiating, the Queen introverted and sustaining, the Prince as its intellectual form, the Princess as its embodied form.
Thoth and Rider-Waite
This card corresponds to the Rider-Waite King of Pentacles. Crowley renamed the ranks to follow the letters of the Name: Knight (Yod), Queen (Heh), Prince (Vau), Princess (final Heh), so that the Thoth Knight is the Waite King and the Thoth Prince the Waite Knight. The figures' mounts follow the Golden Dawn: Knights on horses, Queens on thrones, Princes in chariots, Princesses on foot.
Related cards
Cards ruled
- ♂︎Seven of Wands ValourLeo III, Aug 12–22
- ☉︎Eight of Disks PrudenceVirgo I, Aug 23–Sep 1
- ♀︎Nine of Disks GainVirgo II, Sep 2–11
Trumps of Leo and Virgo
The other Knights
- ♏︎Knight of Wands Fire of FireFire of Fire
- ♒︎Knight of Cups Fire of WaterFire of Water
- ♉︎Knight of Swords Fire of AirFire of Air
The court of Disks
Correspondences follow the Golden Dawn system as used in Crowley's Book of Thoth and Liber 777. Card images are described, not reproduced. Where sources differ.